Kemp Flowmon ADS vs. OpenNMS Meridian

Flowmon ADS is a customizable anomaly detection solution with excellent scalability capabilities and quick integration into the organization environment. Flowmon ADS provides a large set of essential detections out of the box, which allows to quickly acquire an awareness of potential problems in the monitored network. Custom configuration, filters, and false-positive flagging make the system highly customizable for diverse environments. Powerful dashboards make summaries and reporting a breeze. We use the Flowmon Anomaly Detection System daily for event detection and incident handling. It provides high-quality detection methods with low false-positive rates.

I would recommend all system administrators use some form of network monitoring if they are not already doing so, and I'd definitely recommend people consider OpenNMS if they're shopping around. Small businesses will benefit from the low-cost of entry (it's free!), whilst getting all the enterprise features. Larger businesses can benefit from paid support plans.

However, there's no getting around the fact that you will require some advanced networking and sysadmin knowledge to get the most out of OpenNMS, or at least, be prepared for a steep learning curve. If you don't have the resources to devote this time initially, you may struggle.

Incentivized

• Kemp Flowmon ADS provides a large set of essential detections out of the box, which allows us to quickly acquire an awareness of potential problems in the monitored network.
• Custom configuration, filters, and false-positive flagging make the system highly customizable for diverse environments.
• Powerful dashboards make summaries and reporting a breeze.

• Report on SLA
• Group network areas
• Discovery of elements

Incentivized

• Multi-license policy
• Outdated GUI
• Limited use of AI methods

• We've had a few issues with delayed alerting.
• I haven't quite figured out how to make topologies work yet, but I haven't spent a ton of time on it either.
• We've also had a bit of trouble importing some MIBs, but that usually boiled down to working with the vendor to make sure we had the right MIBs and dependencies.

Incentivized

OpenNMS's more attractive GUI and its price break were the main reasons our company chose to explore and use this product. However, it never managed to actually replace Nagios which had a much more established hold within the company. Perhaps we were over-monitoring, but our company claimed a $100k loss per hour of downtime.

Incentivized

• Early detection of cyber security events and incidents.
• Processing a large number of network flows on input (which means more than 60K flows per second)
• Parameterization of detection methods.
• The possibility to decide on the false-positive rate within the output of each method.

• Initial adoption required quite a lot of resources and time to get everything right. Totally worth it for us; just be prepared for a gradual process that will get better and better with time.
• Once setup and running smoothly, it provides us with all the reporting we could hope for, at near zero cost.
• With OpenNMS, we're able to offer a much more reliable service to our customers, and spend a lot less time dealing with issues.

Incentivized